


Rescue

by flammablehat



Series: Cave In [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magic Revealed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-01 18:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flammablehat/pseuds/flammablehat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he'd had a say in the matter, Merlin would not have wanted Arthur to find out by way of Kilgharrah. But that's where an inconvenient sinkhole will get you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wangler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wangler/gifts).



> This is a follow-up piece to [Cave In](http://flammablehat.livejournal.com/44873.html#cutid1). Written for [](http://lolafeist.livejournal.com/profile)[**lolafeist**](http://lolafeist.livejournal.com/) on the occasion of her being excellent. *hugs*  Beta work done by the incomparable [](http://new-kate.livejournal.com/profile)[**new_kate**](http://new-kate.livejournal.com/) and [](http://ella-bane.livejournal.com/profile)[**ella_bane**](http://ella-bane.livejournal.com/).  Any and all remaining mistakes are most certainly my own.
> 
> * * *

The entire face of the granite wall quaked and Arthur didn’t notice.

He puffed raggedly over his stiff fingers; they were so numb he couldn’t feel Merlin’s heart beat in his chest. He couldn’t see a damn thing in the gloom, and between the two it felt like the world had begun to contract sharply around him.

And then snow crumbled down upon their heads in great, heavy piles, loosened under the weight of a giant reptilian snout that blew searing breath into their pit. This, Arthur noticed.

“What have you done?” the dragon said, before Arthur could do more than instinctively hug Merlin’s body against him in a less openly vulnerable position.

“But,” Arthur said, blinking up at the scaly, fierce, intelligent face, “there was only one dragon left in Camelot...”

“I can _smell_ you all over him,” the dragon said, and this time Arthur registered the menace in the creature’s voice.

Which became a secondary concern in the face of a new and unconscionable realization.

“I slayed you,” Arthur blurted. “Merlin said—”

The dragon growled. A scorching wave of rank air knocked Arthur’s head back into the rock. The earthen walls transformed as their skin of ice liquefied in an instant. “Merlin,” it said with rumbling ferocity, “lied.”

The dragon coiled forward, serpentine in the small space.

Arthur dumped Merlin off of his lap as gently as he could manage. “Get back,” he said, hefting his sword. Gratifyingly, and to Arthur’s great surprise, it reared its head back at his challenge.

“Such arrogance,” the dragon said, flicking a claw that sent Arthur’s best and only weapon spinning from his numb hands. “It is no wonder he has kept himself from you, after all of this time.”

“What are you...saying,” Arthur began, then shook his head to clear it of the mist wending around his thoughts. He threw both hands up in a warding pose. “I won’t let you harm him.” He had enough awareness to know how absurd the gesture was in the face of such a beast, but to do anything less was impossible. If a knight lacked a castle or a moat or even a skin of steel between him and his enemy, he always had himself, the final barrier against an onslaught. And Merlin was Arthur’s to guard, even unto their last minutes.

“Pendragon, if the situation was not so dire I would find this display terrifically amusing. However, you are trying my patience. Now stand _aside_.”

“No.” Arthur shook his head, which was a mistake, because he was immediately overcome by an awful pendulous lightheadedness that had him staggering and almost stepping on the rigid sprawl of Merlin’s body.

The dragon snarled, crushing Arthur against the wall with one massive talon. Arthur’s mouth fell open, pain twisting the air from his lungs before he could utter a sound. He writhed, feeling like a beetle half stamped into the dirt. He could only grit his teeth and watch as the dragon bent its scaly head to Merlin’s body and— breathed on him?

Heat spilled into their small close in a damp heavy fog. Arthur felt his clothes flutter and settle, steamed to cool limpness against his skin. Just below his feet Merlin stirred, coughing. Arthur renewed his struggles, beating against the single claw holding him fully clear of the ground, grunting with the effort. The pressure against his chest suddenly increased tenfold and he sagged on a high, thin wheeze.

“He needs you alive,” the dragon said. “Whether he needs you unharmed is another matter.”

“Kilgharrah,” an almost unrecognizable voice chided weakly, prompting Arthur and the dragon both to look down between them. “Please don’t break my king.”

“What?” Arthur said.

“Don’t move, you will aggravate your injuries,” the dragon said, and the gentleness in his tone had Arthur blinking and shaking his head again.

“ _What_?”

“Steady, young warlock,” the dragon said, blowing a different sort of faintly iridescent breath over Merlin’s chest and into his face. Merlin’s eyelids flickered and closed, but not before Arthur saw his brow tense at the address, his head tilting away from Arthur as he slipped into sleep.

“What did you do to him?” Arthur asked. He felt surprisingly calm.

“I helped him,” the dragon said, abruptly removing his claw. Arthur slid to the ground, legs useless beneath him. He dragged himself to Merlin’s side like a clumsy insect, sweeping his palm over Merlin’s chest and releasing a breath.

“Merlin has magic,” Arthur said. “Is that...what you meant by—”

“Merlin _is_ magic, Pendragon.”

“No.” Arthur held his head. “It’s impossible. He would have told me.”

“Oh?” The dragon turned to face him. Arthur thought he could see the sculpture of one chitinous brow arching in a disturbingly human expression. “My mistake.”

“I’m the best friend he has in the world, he would have _told_ me. And,” Arthur insisted, “ _and_ — he can’t keep a secret to save his miserable life.” This, said like a thrown trump card.

“I see.”

“He probably didn’t even know he had magic. Calling you to come...breathe on him was just an extremely latent survival instinct.”

“Then how do you explain why I listened?” The dragon said with infuriating softness.

“Well!” Arthur threw up his hands, looking the dragon up and down and weathering a sudden flash of intense annoyance. “You tell me! You’re the one who came like a bidden hound!”

“You are closer to the truth than you realize, young Pendragon,” the dragon said. “But there is no more time to waste. Merlin is not yet healed. His hurts are many, and he will need aid I cannot provide.”

Arthur snorted bitterly. The dragon could hardly even fit its forelegs inside the hole he had expected to _die_ in, like a trapped beast. With Merlin. Merlin, who had shown himself prepared to take his secrets to the grave if Arthur hadn’t been quite so determined to follow him down. He’d been a fool.

“Take him, then,” Arthur said, going to retrieve his sword. The dragon stared at him.

“How, exactly, do you imagine I will get Merlin back inside your keep if I approach the city without its king?”

“I haven’t the faintest,” Arthur said. “You could always try the Druids.” He shook out his cloak and swung it around his shoulders, wincing when his host of injuries made themselves known all at once, having been thawed into a throbbing, aching chorus by the dragon’s furnace-like presence. Checking the sit of his sword, he approached the wall and tested a couple of gnarled roots for their stability. Unfrozen as they now were, he had better purchase for the climb to freedom. He made to start scaling the wall before the touch of one giant talon gave him pause.

“He needs the physician. You have sustained him this long. Do not be the reason he fails. Do not make your pride the price for his life.”

Arthur turned his face away, teeth clenched. He shook off the dragon’s claw. The roots in his fists creaked under the burden of his full weight.

When he reached the surface, he dropped his hands to his knees, uncomfortably breathless. Behind him, the dragon was silent and utterly still.

“Well?” Arthur snapped, not looking around. “Are you coming?”

\----------------------

When he woke, Merlin felt no pain — only the not-altogether-pleasant sense that his head had been stuffed with something thick and soft through which the world filtered muzzily. As his eyes were working well enough, and he was cogent enough to correctly identify his surroundings as Gaius’ chambers, he could only conclude his haziness was the lingering effect of some potion upon his system.

And because his last waking memory was of Kilgharrah’s giant yellow eyes staring concern down upon him while he held Arthur pinned to a wall, disorientation was the last thing Merlin wanted to wake up to.

“Gaius?” he croaked, shuffling up onto his elbows. Dizziness swam over his head and he closed his eyes.

“He’s out at the moment,” said the voice Merlin had least expected to hear.

He tried to focus on the far corner of the room, the corner cast in partial shadow near the door. Arthur wasn’t hiding, of course, because Merlin could see every inch of him from his chest down to the floor. Only his face was truly obscured, his voice so deliberately mild there was nothing to be found in it except his words.

“What,” Merlin began, then carefully reconsidered what he was going to say. “How did we—?”

“We flew,” Arthur said simply. “I carried you here. Gaius cut you open and sewed you back together. Like a pheasant.”

“Oh.” Merlin looked down at his own stomach, wrapped tight with fresh bandages that climbed almost halfway up his ribs. “I don’t feel anything.”

Arthur took a step forward into the light, and then another, approaching Merlin’s side with an unusual attitude of restraint. Merlin looked into his face and felt a sensation like icy mountain water flushing through his veins. There was no recognition. Not even anger or disbelief. It drove a feeling up into the center of his chest like a stake; a sense of being unknown, alien, in his own home. “Gaius told me no other patient would have had much hope of surviving such a procedure.”

“We were...we were gone for a long time,” Merlin said, hoarse. “He had nothing to lose by trying.”

“No other patient. Not even one he had witnessed fall from such a height himself. Not even if it had been midsummer, and he had every tool of his trade at his immediate disposal. He hardly waited for me to set you down before he took a knife to you.”

“Are you mad at him?” Merlin said.

“No.”

Merlin held his breath at that, hesitant to turn the word over for its possible implications in either direction. Arthur’s expression hadn’t shifted; his voice hadn’t changed.

“Where is Kilgharrah?” Merlin said. It felt lawless to speak his name. But Arthur already knew, and if Merlin was uncertain of his own fate he would at least know Kilgharrah’s.

“See for yourself.” Arthur gestured at the courtyard facing window. Merlin lurched out of bed, his stomach protesting. He stumbled against the window frame, spying a familiar dark hide stretched like a lazy cat across the cobblestones. Arthur’s knights clustered around the dragon’s long body, and while Merlin watched, Kilgharrah flamed at the man standing closest to his mouth. It looked like hardly more than a breath of fire, but at close range in full armor Merlin could only imagine it would feel like being momentarily roasted. Faint sounds of laughter drifted up to them. Merlin grinned in spite of himself until he turned back to Arthur’s unmoving face.

“Arthur,” Merlin began, but felt his throat lock up before he could continue. Finally, Arthur’s mouth twitched, but only in the fleeting shape of a sneer.

“Nothing to say?” he asked, and Merlin felt the words like a lash. “You tamed him, right? Or, no — this is the kind, _foreign_ cousin of the beast who slaughtered my people and almost destroyed this city.” Arthur snapped his fingers. “He’s really just an enchanted deer! This is the work of a cunning adept!”

“Stop,” Merlin pleaded, feeling acid rise in his throat. “You have no idea the things I’ve done—”

“You’re right, Merlin, you’re right,” Arthur said, his expression utterly transformed. “I know only what you _told_ me. You should be proud — you’ve crafted an alternate reality with nothing more than your words! I’d call that a kind of artistic irony for a man of your skills, don’t you think?”

“For you!” Merlin said. “I did it all for you!”

“What _difference_ ,” Arthur shouted, “does that make? No, shut up,” he gestured sharply when Merlin made to speak. “I cannot hear another word from you. I cannot—” Arthur said, cutting himself off abruptly and turning away.

Merlin’s chest shook, hot tears spilling down his cheeks and panic leaping up around his heart. He watched Arthur place his head in his hands, walk unsteadily towards the door, and it felt as though a part of Merlin was dying, withering with every step Arthur took.

“Please,” he said, catching his breath when Arthur hesitated on the threshold. Merlin held out his hands and stared at the loose curl of his fingers over his palms. “Before. Before this. Did you...trust...in me _only_ because you believed that I was not a sorcerer?”

Arthur said nothing. And then he stood straight, and didn’t turn, and lifted the latch on the door.

Merlin recoiled at the stab of such a clear dismissal, stumbling and half falling. There was a dizzy moment where he felt as though the air had been sucked from his body, condensing the hot, hard knot under his lungs into something tangible. His hands began to glow.

Arthur spun at the sound of Merlin’s knees hitting stone, his unthinking first instinct for concern sending a wrenching heave of emotion through Merlin’s center. And then Arthur looked up, and his face went white.

It was a sphere, a cool glowing ball hovering just above their heads. Merlin breathed harshly, swallowing his own wet noises. “Take it with you,” he said. Pain and wretched anger warred over Arthur’s face, his eyes sparkling as he lifted his hand toward the little ball before visibly restraining himself. “God, you stupid, _stupid_ ass,” Merlin snarled, his body trying to curl around the sucking empty hole opening up in his gut. “If I had _ever_ wanted to hurt you I would have smothered you in your sleep with a perfectly benign pillow. Just take it with you; it’ll help, I promise—”

“Merlin,” Arthur spoke over him, his voice as wrecked as his face.

“Take it with you,” Merlin insisted, closing his eyes. He found himself reduced to a very simple need to have this one request granted. He couldn’t lose Arthur, he would never lose Arthur — not completely. Some part of him, perhaps his dragon-cursed destiny, would always carry a light for his king. But Arthur could still shut him out, could send him away — could even have him killed. Arthur could make himself the guard to his own isolated prison.

He didn’t realize he had continued to repeat himself until he felt his shoulders being crushed under Arthur’s hands.

“Merlin,” Arthur grit, tugging him to his feet. Merlin struggled against the hold, biting down on a miserable sob. “Shut _up_ ,” Arthur begged, his fingers squeezing tight for a long moment before he cupped Merlin’s jaw in both warm palms and kissed him.

The little globe spun, pulsing bright, before bursting over them in a brilliant silvery corona.  



End file.
